Psion Abacus

[bwinkel67]

Does Abacus support the modulus operator? It has an int function and supports exponentiation both using ^ and the exp() function. I've tried all sorts of characters to no avail. I currently am computing a - int(a/n)*n, to compute a mod n, but it would be nicer to simplify it.

[tofro]

You're doing it right. To my knowledge, there's no simpler way to execute MOD in Abacus

[bwinkel67]

I have been playing with Abacus and Easel and I must say, even on a 128K machine with microdrives, it works pretty seamlessly. I can only imagine what 512K of memory, Choice, and a RAM disk would do the the experience. I guess I was ignorant of spreadsheets in the early 90s as I might have used Abacus once or twice just for its tablular ability to list text and numbers in rows, but never used the formulas and functions. As for Easel, probably never even opened it once then. Now, having had to use Excel at times to do some number crunching, pretty amazed with those two pieces of software, how well they run on a BBQL, and the fact that the US version deals with the screen properly.

Anyone every write any conversion software from Abacus to Lotus or Excel, etc that transfers the formulas and functions?

P.S. I just did a video where I repeated some school work my students had to do analyzing pseudo random number generators in Excel...worked pretty similarly and wasn't that much slower. Just the amount of data was slightly different. I had them do a couple of thousand values whereas I could only do 1K.

[swensont]

bwinkle,

You might find the following SMSQzine articles interesting:

Astronomical Calculations with Abacus and Archive - Issue #3
PC Four to QL Xchange - Issue #6
History of Psion Xchange - Issue #6
Abacus - Issue 38

converting spreadsheets from Abacus to others will work with .csv files, but I don't think the formulas will convert.
If the formulas can be converted to a text file, I'm sure a simple Perl script could be written to change one formula for another.

Tim

[bwinkel67]

Is there a site for SMSQzine? I found a few issues on the internet archive.

[dilwyn]

Document attached originally from Dave Walker, contains information on the internal formats of the Psion programs. Had to zip it up as the Forum wouldn't accept it as an attachment otherwise. The file is called Textidy_ref - it's actually a Quill DOC file but presumably Dave renamed it as there was another file called textidy_doc in the package. Just search for Abacus in the doc.

textidy.zip

Textidy_ref doc

(24.07 KiB) Downloaded 23 times

SMSQzine - see here: https://dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/ezines/qhj ... index.html
Don't know if up to date, first six issues there.

[swensont]

All my zines and stuff are on my website:

http://swensont.epizy.com/

Tim

[bwinkel67]

All my zines and stuff are on my website:

http://swensont.epizy.com/

Tim

Interesting comparison of Abacus to VisiCalc in issue #8 (you had a typo above with issue 38). The QL software bundle was pretty well developed. It's interesting because the other 16-bit computers at that time came with almost nothing (well, except the Mac did have MacWrite and MacPaint). The only thing I recall coming close was the Commodore Plus/4 having a built-in business-suite and it flopped (reading some reviews that software seemed to have...cough...not been good). I guess back then people didn't care about it as much as we do now.

[Cristian]

What a great software (from 1984!)